CleanFish: Supplying Sustainable Seafood for All
by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA on 07.28.08
Cleaner Fish to Halt Ocean Crisis
Given TreeHugger’s concerns about overfishing and climate change threatening global fish stocks, and given our enthusiasm for sustainable fisheries, it’s a little surprising that we have yet to run a post on San Francisco based CleanFish - a company we learned about through Food & Wine Magazine’s recent green issue. CleanFish is dedicated to finding the cleanest, most sustainably produced fish and supplying it to restaurants and retailers. This from the company’s website:
“CleanFish is a company, an aspiration and a movement. We care about taste, quality, people and the health of our planet. We believe that these days, sustainable seafood of the highest quality and taste is only possible when it comes from artisans who carefully cultivate or harvest with a depth of tradition, stewardship, and respect for the communities and precious ecosystems in which we all eat and live.”
Sounds pretty darned good. Given that the company supplies locations as far apart as New York and San Francisco, and given that their catch includes Mexican shrimp, Australian sea bass and Texas redfish, I suspect that CleanFish isn’t for the locavores among us (I couldn’t find anything about offsets, or prioritising local sourcing on their website). But given the perilous state of our global fisheries, and the global nature of the modern seafood market, anything that provides a financial incentive for conservation has got to be a step in the right direction.
::CleanFish::via Food & Wine Magazine::
More on Overfishing and Sustainable Seafood
Overfishing and Climate Change Threaten Global Fish Stocks
World’s First Sustainable Tuna Fishery Certified
Top 10 Threats to Oceans and Coasts in South America
WWF Launches Campaign Against Bycatch
Wal-Mart to Sell “Sustainable Shrimp”
10 Solutions to Save the Oceans
Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- Un-Treehugger Events of the Year
- How are fishing quotas set?
- How Fisheries Work
- Cod Confusion: More Fishing, More Farming, the End of Baltic Cod?
Fish is one of our "locavore" exemptions because we both love it but we live in Dallas and no one wants to eat anything that comes out of the Trinity River.
I'll certainly look for CleanFish when I'm doing my fish shopping.
I was in Whole Foods in Northern Virginia (DC suburbs) yesterday - they were selling wild caught Chilean Sea Bass.
I sighed... and then went to fill out a comment card asking them to stop selling something that's being over-fished to the verge of collapse.
It's predicted that 90% of ocean life will be extinct by 2050. This is due not only to overfishing but indirectly d/t pollution and other related causes. Particularly disturbing is the escalating area of marine dead zones from polluted freshwater run-off.
The quickest and simplest mitigating effect could come from a conversion to moderate vegetarianism. No need to totally eliminate all meat from the diet (although I have) but just making it a minor source of food calories i.e. picnics, BBQs and special events, would cause dramatic decreases in many, many forms of pollution.
I would encourage all readers to google up some of the environmental impacts of CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) and ask yourselves what role you want to play in this phenomenon.